Ok, for the past many months I have been having an issue with Safari losing all of it’s cookies randomly. The Cookies.plist file would go empty thus losing all my logins for websites. I was not able to figure out what was eating Safari’s cookies until just recently.
There never seemed to be a pattern to what was causing it. Not a specific site. Nothing l could seemingly track and reproduce. I always had a feeling it was caused by Mac OS X 10.5. The issue also appeared to be separate from a recent cookie issue that was fixed. But I might have found the real reason.
The desktop software Plaxo provides to sync the Mac OS X Addressbook appears to set tracking cookies in the Cookies.plist. It does this without even visiting the site. And it seems to have a habbit of destroying the Cookies.plist when it tries to update sometimes. This might be due to not using the Cookies.plist API, or it might conflict with an update from a website happening at the same time, thus nuking the file.
Either way, for the longest time my cookies would disappear multiple times a day. But now after removing the Plaxo software (partly a seemingly evil input manager) no more cookie destruction. If you have Cookies disappearing, and Plaxo for Mac installed. Do an uninstall of Plaxo and see if your problem goes away.
WHat?! That’s just nasty.
Yup, one month later and Safari is still not eating the cookies multiple times a day!
My cookies have been disappearing each session when I quit Safari. I don’t have Plaxo nor have I visited it. I saw on another blog that unspecific sites may trigger this behavior and for no apparent reason. I did an Apple update a week or so ago but not sure if that had anything to do with it. I’m, on a 2.66 Mac Pro Workstation with 10.4.11 and Safari Version 3.1.2 (4525.22).
WTF! My cookies are all working now. They were cleared out but once I log-in now they’re retained. Freaky–I didn’t do anything to remedy.